THE SINGING METAPHOR Poetry of Rienzi Crusz Uma Parameswaran R CRUSZ STANDS squarely in the English literary tradi- 1 V.IENZI tion of Shakespeare, Milton and the Bible. His mother tongue is English, and he speaks no other language. He is a Canadian poet, never having written poetry or any other kind of creative writing until he immigrated into Canada in 1965. The story of how he came to poetry is interesting. After working for thirteen years as research librarian in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), he came to Canada; as a single parent of three children, all under the age of ten, he was glad to take any job he was offered ; he found himself appointed a cataloguer at the University of Toronto Library. The sheer boredom of having to churn out five hundred catalogue cards a day drove him to poetry. He sent four of his poems to Irving Layton with a note asking if Layton thought he had any talent or "should I collect postage stamps?" Layton replied, "Forget about postage stamps. The poems are very good indeed." Today Rienzi Crusz is the author of five volumes of poetry: Flesh and Thorn (1975), Elephant and Ice (1980), Singing Against the Wind (1985), A Time for Loving (1986) and Still Close to the Raven ( 1989). A sixth volume, The Rain Doesn't Know Me Any More, is due for publication in the very near future. Rienzi Crusz was born into a burgher family (like Michael Ondaatje) on October 17, 1925 in Colombo. The burghers claim descent from European colo- nists who fathered children on Sinhalese women. In one of his poems, Crusz refers to "A Portuguese captain [who] holds / the soft brown hand of my Sinhala mother. / It's the year 1515 A.D." ( "Roots" TL 69 ) His father was a mathematics instructor who, as Crusz says in a poetic tribute, "chased the ultimate equation / the some- thing that flowed / from heaven to earth / earth to heaven." ("Elegy" TL 57) It was perhaps from him that Crusz developed his love for precision, for the symmetry and structure that permeate his poetry. His mother, Cleta Marcellina Serpanchy, from the three poems in which she appears that Crusz has said are biographical, seems to have been an efficient homemaker "squeezing out the shine / from veran- 146 CRUSZ dah chairs, the red cement floor / a mirror to your sweaty face." ("Elegy" TL 79) She was a devoted mother, feeding, "hectoring" and sacrificing all she had for her eight children. Critics and reviewers have seen Crusz as mastering an alien tongue and culture. Arun Mukherjee, one of our most forthright critics of imperialism, speaks of third world Calibans who must perforce speak Prospero's tongue. Of Crusz she says: Like Yeats, he has created his own mythology and rhetoric because the available conventions of Anglo-Canadian poetry do not serve his needs. The comfortable sense of tradition which a mainstream poet enjoys in relationship with the readers from a similar cultural background, and which performs half of our labour for us — familiar allusions, a shared past, binding conventions, is unavailable to Crusz for it, being alien, will only falsify his meaning. Michael Estok, in a review article, says Crusz's work is "in the mainstream of Canadian culture" because immigrant sensibility that seeks to come to grips with the "extended wholeness of life" is mainstream sensibility, but he goes on to say that "unlike so much in the history of Canadian writing, Crusz is derivative of no one." Though both critics are complimentary to Crusz, and have their partial rele- vance, their statements are not quite true. In the erstwhile British Empire, as I have noted in an earlier study (Vikas 1976) there were several generations of South Asians I call "native-aliens" whose language of proficiency was English and who excelled in all that British education had to offer but who oftentimes knew little about their own indigenous culture or language. Crusz shares the same literary experience as most Canadians of his generation that was closer to standard British school curricula across the Empire than the present generation is. He is derivative, not in any pejorative sense, of Milton, Dylan Thomas and the Bible, just as Mar- garet Laurence is. Landscape, and not sensibility or educational background, is the difference between Crusz and native-born Canadians. Reared a Roman Catho- lic, Crusz's childhood was saturated with psalm-singing and Bible reading. As Judith Miller says of his poems, "they carry a language of modulated rhythm and sonority, the language of oral poetry and of the King James version of the Bible." Two sets of memories that he talks about in his public readings are : standing at his brother's door listening enthralled to a recitation of Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven" and going to movie versions of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Julius Caesar. Many of his poems echo Thompson's form and philosophy, and Shakespeare's cadence. Like many others across the British world in the first half of this century, Crusz grew up with the poetry and sensibilities of the English Romantics and his poetry bears witness to his careful observations of nature's sights and sounds. His home stood a hundred yards from the beaches and ditches of Galle Face Green and Layard's Folly, and on the same road as the house of the Chilean ambassador 147 CRU S Z Pablo Neruda. During the last two decades, Crusz has enjoyed with the pleasure of recognition the Sri Lankan landscapes that appear in Neruda's works, and has been an avid and conscientious reader of South American writers, as evidenced by the epigraphs he selects for various parts of his volumes. Crusz took an Honours degree in history and later received a Colombo Plan scholarship to study Library Science at the University of London. He earned his living as a bank clerk until 1965 when he left Ceylon for Canada with his three children, who figure in his early collections. He is now married to Ann, also from Sri Lanka, and lives in Waterloo, Ontario with her and their teenage son, who seems to have given a lighter touch to the later poems in his continuing dialectic of Sun Man and Winter Man, elephant and ice. Τ.HE FIRST POEM IN his first collection, Flesh and Thorn, is typical of Crusz and representativI HI e of his poetics. It is carefully crafted, structurally balanced and thematically explicit. It is also a metaphor of his own poetic process ; it says that considerable force has to be skilfully applied before an experience becomes a poem. Titled "How does one reach the sweet kernel?" it is a love poem on the first level. The metaphor of love is developed in three steps. The first stanza describes the husking of a coconut by a Ceylonese farmer, the second connects that to one kind of love, and the third contrasts this process to another kind of love. The description of husking a coconut is visual and violent. The coconut is pierced on a standing crowbar, the shell is cut with a machete and the sweet kernal "opens out like a womb." This simile with which the first stanza ends serves as transition to the second stanza which describes sexual force in visually explicit terms — "that hangs exotic and hard / like a bunch of king coconuts /on the palm of our dreams." The usage of "palm" is interesting. Along with a more literal image of the metaphor in progress, namely, the palm tree on which the coconut clusters hang, the possi- bility of holding something in the palm of one's hand is hinted. This echo of Dylan Thomas, or rather Thomas' technique of slightly varying familiar phrases to give a startling new effect, occurs frequently in Crusz. The third stanza is short. It describes another kind of love, genteel and "tenta- tive," clearly love that the persona finds repugnant. The contrast between the two kinds of love is expressed in the choice of fruits, coconut and plum. Everything about the plum is on the surface; there are no hidden delights, no struggle with thick fibres and hard shell before one can burst into the "kernel of the heart." Using a sexual metaphor, Eliot's Prufrock asks, "Do I dare to eat a peach?" Crusz overturns this analogy, showing that the peach-plum family of fruits is for toothless, anemic Prufrocks, not for full-blooded human beings. The double metaphor — of the process of love and of poetry — is unmistakable. 148 CRU S Z Crusz's preoccupation with poetics recurs in numerous poems. Of particular relevance in the present context is his own recognition that poetry revolves around metaphors. He says in the title poem of The Rain Doesn't Know Me Anymore (which I read in typescript) : "I, who for so long / shaped the forgotten meta- phor," know "a horizon that would never stand still." The visionaries whom he celebrates in "Truth," are also poets "the madcaps . who dared / to crawl up the volcano's rib / and balance on a rim of flame." In "Pardon My Muted Ways," when the woman asks, Why a Christ on every hair of your head, metaphors delicate as wind ... from some prophecy of pain? the persona replies, . once long ago a haunting face drained the Sun-Man to pale bone till night collapsed his eyes and love slept off its wounds. His early poetry is suffused with the pain inflicted by that haunting face. Auto- biographical details are never far from Crusz's poetry, and it might justifiably be said that Flesh and Thorn traces a period in the poet's life, a period that was domi- nated by two events — the breakdown of his marriage and his emigration from his native Ceylon.